A good place to start is to check out what most of the prestigious studios and mastering engineers like to use. Full range accuracy at both low level and realistic live sound levels is actually quite rare in home hi-fi.
Showing 9 responses by shadorne
If you look at the history of ATC you realize why it is popular in studios. It has nothing to do with the way they sound. Perhaps it is the way they look - such aesthetically elegant black boxes the likes of which few have ever seen! Perhaps they are so heavy that they are harder to steal than the wonderful sounding Yamaha NS-10's ;-) |
Perhaps, but it was mainly the fact that they can play loud and not break. Agreed but isn't that what accurate reproduction is about? The 120 db dynamic range of our hearing! Many unamplified instruments have huge dynamic range, which means they can go very loud indeed - especially transients from percussion and from wind instruments, such as horns. There is a plethora of good speakers that can perform extremely well up to about 100 db SPL (most with mass-produced Northern European drivers), you know, Typical Hi-Fi Speakers. |
Roy, I have not seen the plots you refer to so perhaps you could PM it? Your observation that ATC powerful mid domes can sound harsh when driven hard is a fair one. ATC claim IM distortion in the inner ear affects hearing at extreme levels (could it all be marketing hype as you suggest - I don't know). What I do know is that they sound too harsh on certain recordings like Green Day and other hyper compressed modern CD's (ONLY when played extremely loud of course). Bear in mind, that it is principally the dispersion pattern of a dome mid which is desirable and not low distortion levels. It is well known that large dome mids are difficult to build with distortion levels as low as regular cones - ATC actually uses two suspensions to help maintain VC alignment. So playing loud while maintaining accuracy/linearity similar to what can be achieved quite easily at low level, as you point out, is extremely difficult to achieve (exponentially difficult in fact). This is why most cheap headphones are very impressive in linearity and distortion figures compared to speakers! This is why there are a great many excellent speakers that go up to 100 db SPL. Incidently, your Magico's apparently use constrained layer damping in the mid range cone. I read somewhere that ATC is doing this too on their entry line...lighter cones, smaller motors and yet well damped...a recipe for good sound to me! I must admit the Magico V3 sure looks impressive and the Ultimate is so extreme I doubt I'll ever see one let alone hear one! You could do us a favor and post pics of your Virtual System as I bet it is accurate ;-) |
The dealer had a cone on hand to demonstrate how he can stand on an 8 grams 6 cone and not break or bent it. Very impressive. That is amazing! Light weight rigid cones are very attractive for rigid "piston' behaviour. The ability to control them with a small motor makes them very efficient, however, the issue then becomes one of managing the bell-like ringing rather than break-up. Soft viscous dense damped woven materials whilst less "pistonic" dampen this ringing at the expense of higher cone weights and more massive motor structures and a more limited frequency range before they "break-up"....a trade off if you like that results in inefficient drivers with narrower frequency ranges. Some materials/geometries provide a good balance for damping with both light weight and low cost - such as polypropylene woofers. Another issue is beaming - this causes a reduction in the power response in the upper mids (even if on axis is ok) and will make a speaker sound less harsh at elevated levels. 6 or 7 inch cones are less well suited to upper mid range frequencies but 3 inch drivers, which are better for upper mids, suffer in generating the necessary SPL's at lower mids due to the large amounts of travel required and the difficulty in maintaining alignment on a small structure. Some speakers use two mid range drivers to help overcome this issue in a Dappolito arrangement. Some will simply accept to take a dip in the mids at elevated levels. Some will crossover the tweeter lower to limit the beaming but then run into tweeter compression issues at elevated levels (again a dip in the upper mids). It is all a balance of compromises at the end of the day. So while I agree that pistonic is ideal in some ways it is another design factor in the grand scheme of things. The MAGICO constrained layer damped cone is what impresses me most as it apppears to use a sandwich of rigid pistonic material constraining a viscous layer in the middle which acts to dampen the ringing (it shears when bell-like behaviour occurs in the outside rigid materials). Finally, an extremly rigid pistonic cone that may not suffer from too much audible out of band ringing. It may not address beaming from cones but it will likely be extremely linear and low distortion (accurate) particularly on axis. |
i have yet to be in a studio big or small and seen 'any' post work on 'any' audio track done with anything that resembles something considered 'audiophile'.....the 'room' must truly be the thing, and the mixes (and opinions) from engineer to engineer are as varied as opinions on this thread. Quite true. Some studios, such as Crystalphonic cost five MILLION dollars - so there is no way they resemble a home Hi-Fi! However, many sound engineers are not beyond the semi-religious kind of simple tweaking and attentioin to minor details that is normally associated with audiophiles, such as what an amp sits upon, or what kind of wire runs between a woofer and an amplifier! So I don't think you can dismiss this group, if anything they are surely more discerning buyers than people who have a day job and come home to their system only in the evening/weekends. Here is a great example of the use of Shakti pads, Van den Hull cable rewiring of speakers and many other tweaks that highly respected sound engineers get up to on a boat...as the sailor said quote, "Now ain't that a hole in the boat"! |
Gregm, Good point. I think that an "accurate" speaker-system is capable of creating a NEW musical event in the room, BASED on the original recorded event."is a nice way to put it. I also think that Donald's statement, 1. Most accurate at creating the illusion of a live concert or musicians in your home? is so true of the majority of HI-FI today. Sadly the pursuit of sizzle and hyped sound in order to differentiate and impress has left people feeling that the above are mutually exclusive goals. Either you get an atmospheric warm lush sound with little accuracy in timbre and poor dynamics or you get a clinical and dynamic sound with the tiniest sweetspot and with music so unnatural sounding that it feels like it has been torn apart or dissected, even if it is exciting because of the impact. However, I strongly believe that THE goal is to strike a healthy balance. A large sweetspot with an even and natural sound field coupled with precise timbre and realistic dynamics. Aristotle would describe this as the "golden mean". A "Goldilock's System", where everything is just right and balanced; natural in tonality, timbre, dynamics, accuracy AND acoustic sound field. The blind pursuit of any single passion, such as a holographic image or deep lush bass, generally comes at the expense of other virtues in a system. It soon becomes tiring and the gear "merry-go-round" keeps on turning... |